superior height with sudden suspicion. If this was just a hoax?

“Well, what’s the matter anyway?” he asked again.

She looked away from him without answering.

Micky began to feel a bit of a fool; he wished he had not yielded to the impulse to follow her. After all, it was no business of his if a stranger chose to walk about his road and weep; he looked at her impatiently.

Her hair beneath its not very smart hat shone golden in the lamplight, and the little oval of cheek and rounded chin which was all he could see of her averted face somehow touched a forgotten chord in his heart and made him think of his boyhood and the girl-mother 6 who had not lived long enough to be more than a memory....

6

“Don’t think I’m interfering or trying to annoy you,” he said again. “But if there is anything I can do to help you....”

She shook her head.

“There isn’t anything.... I ought to have known better than to let you hear that I was crying ... there’s nothing the matter, I–––” Then quite suddenly she broke down again into bitter sobbing. “Oh, I’m so miserable––so utterly miserable––I wish I were dead!”

Micky was appalled; he had heard women say that sort of thing before, and had said it himself scores of times, but never with that note of tragedy which he heard in this girl’s voice.

Ten minutes ago he had considered himself the most miserable of mortals because he had been let down over a dinner; he was ashamed of his temper now as he stood there in the starlight and listened to this girl’s sobbing.

“Look here,” he said after a moment, “you’ll never feel any better if you stay out here in the cold. I don’t suppose you’ve had a respectable meal for hours either––I know what women are. Where do you live? You’ll soon feel better when you get beside a fire and have something to eat.”

“I’m not going home any more,” she said.

She spoke quite quietly, but with a sort of despair which there was no mistaking.

Micky was a rapid thinker. He had clean forgotten his headache. This was adventure with a capital letter. There was still something of romance in the world which his jaded palate had not yet tasted.

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